A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft

HOUSTON — As a teenager, Ted Cruz was an intense and eloquent parser of free-market economics, dazzling Rotary Clubs here in Houston by reciting the Constitution. At Princeton, he was a champion debater and an intellectual leader of a band of conservative students. He was a star at Harvard Law School and clerked for the chief justice of the United States.

But few may have imagined Mr. Cruz, 41, in his newest role, as the Tea Party favorite and Republican candidate for the United States Senate, trading verbal orchids with the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Mr. Cruz earned the nomination on Tuesday in a runoff election after more than a year of sweaty street campaigning, drawing national attention for beating Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the more experienced nominee of the Texas Republican establishment.

“I’d have predicted that he would be a professor, not a politician,” said Robert P. George, Mr. Cruz’s adviser at Princeton in the early 1990s. Professor George, a noted social conservative, said that Mr. Cruz stood out even among his Ivy League peers as “intellectually and morally serious,” writing his thesis on the separation of powers.

“But he’s certainly not a shrinking violet,” Professor George quickly added in an interview on Tuesday — to which, Mr. Dewhurst, a wealthy conservative who had the support of Gov. Rick Perry, can attest.

Mr. Cruz’s victory in November is all but assured in this heavily Republican state and marks a shift to the right in the already conservative party here. Political elders and experts who have watched him during his time here as state solicitor general and on the campaign trail predict that he will be an intellectual force in Congress on behalf of constitutional limits on federal power. He is expected to join Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and other Tea Party icons as an uncompromising irritant of mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike.

It helps, of course, that Mr. Cruz has the smooth good looks and practiced speech of a television host and is able to channel his knowledge into sound bites.

“He has the potential to be a national figure,” said Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, noting Mr. Cruz’s intellect and oratorical skills.

“He’ll be a senator from the second-largest state in the nation,” Mr. Jones said, “and he’s very good on television, a perfectly designed politician for today’s 24-hour news cycle.”

Speaking to the Values Voters Summit in Washington in October, Mr. Cruz drew a standing ovation as he repeated the themes of the political and religious right, sometimes sounding more ideologue than intellectual. He called President Obama the country’s “most radical president,” railed against the “gay rights agenda” and warned against new threats to “religious liberty.” Within days, National Review anointed him “the next great conservative hope.”

On Tuesday, as he greeted supporters in sweltering heat outside a polling station, Mr. Cruz and his wife, Heidi, were picture-perfect, not a wrinkle on their clothes nor a hair out of place.

Mr. Cruz said that his first dive into electoral politics had left him feeling “invigorated and inspired.”

“Every day, I come home with a spring in my step,” he said to the wildly enthusiastic group of grass-roots volunteers and to the cameras. “We’ve got to work together to stop the Obama agenda and take this country back.”

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“I’d have predicted that he would be a professor,” said Ted Cruz’s onetime Princeton adviser.Credit
Ben Sklar for The New York Times

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on Dec. 22, 1970, in Calgary, Alberta, where his parents worked in the oil business.

Mr. Cruz’s parents are central to the personal narrative he tells, how he got so devoted to his conservative brand of freedom. His father, also Rafael, now a Baptist pastor, fled Cuba in 1957 with $100 sewn into his underwear and worked his way through the University of Texas. His mother, Eleanor, was the first in her family to finish college, at Rice, and ran an energy company. They returned to Texas when he was a child, and he graduated from a Baptist high school in Houston.

His father told him as a child, Mr. Cruz often says, that “if we lose our freedom here, where do we go?”

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Tuesday night, Mr. Cruz was joined on the victory stand by his parents, his wife and two small, blond daughters who held their hands over their ears as the large crowd cheered wildly.

Mr. Cruz tends to spend any spare time with his daughters, said his friend Kelly Shackelford, president of the Liberty Institute, an evangelical Christian legal group based in Texas.

Mr. Cruz worked in private law practice in the late 1990s and then began his turn into politics, working on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush and then working at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department.

In 2003 he returned to Texas as solicitor general, giving him a direct chance to press for his ideals in the courts.

Mr. Cruz argued before the Supreme Court nine times and has trumpeted his successes. In his most notable victory, the court affirmed the right of Texas to ignore instructions from the International Court of Justice and the Bush administration to review an illegal immigrant’s death sentence.

He also helped argue that Texas could have a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Capitol, and keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. But critics say that in the campaign he took too much credit for his own role in those cases, which are red meat for his evangelical supporters. Since 2008 he has worked in a private law firm here, Morgan Lewis, often representing corporate clients.

In the runoff campaign, Mr. Cruz scorched his opponent with charges that he was a conciliator, too quick to compromise. But Mr. Cruz has yet to grapple with the seemingly impossible choices faced by Congress as it seeks to balance the budget without gutting Medicare or Social Security, for example.

In the last few days of the campaign — perhaps in a last-minute effort to attract mainstream Republicans, or perhaps in a preview of the tasks ahead — Mr. Cruz sounded a bit more conciliatory himself, suddenly talking about “reaching across the aisle.”

In a brief interview on Tuesday, he said that his role model in this respect was Ronald Reagan. “President Reagan stood for conservative principles in a way that brought people together,” he said.

Republicans have too often had it backward, he said, “making hateful attacks but then compromising on basic principle.”

“But I am not willing to compromise on allowing the government to keep growing and expanding our debt,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2012, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle And Intellectual Heft. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe